Domestic Clearing Is Over in Mexico! Reports
Tere Grossman
April 19 - Mexico City, Mexico
DOMESTIC CLEARING IS OVER IN MEXICO!
DOMESTIC CLEARING IS OVER IN MEXICO!
DOMESTIC CLEARING IS OVER IN MEXICO!
"Incredible but true," writes
Tere Grossman, "but today the Mexican government published
a notice in the official newspaper that says, as of today, mariners
will only be required to check in with a port captain when they
are coming from or going to an international port. This means
that 'domestic clearance' - clearing in and out every time you
enter a new port captain district inside Mexico - is history!
They [boatowners] will now only have to let a marina know when
they arrive, and the marina only has to have a record of who
comes and goes."
"I have been working on this for almost
30 years, and am very excited!" says Grossman, who once
told President Vicente Fox that the clearing process was like
having to go through the 'stations of the cross'. Tere Grossman
is the President of the Mexican Marina Owners Association, and
her family owns Marina San Carlos and other marine interests.
We're breaking out the champagne here at
the Latitude 38 office, for this is something we've worked
on for decades with Tere and others, bending the ear of every
Mexican official and journalist we could find. When a Mexico
City newspaper recently interviewed us about how to make boat
tourism in Mexico more attractive, we told them: 1. Get rid of
domestic clearance, 2. Get rid of domestic clearance, 3. Get
rid of domestic clearance.
Assuming Tere has interpreted the notice
correctly, we can't emphasize how huge this is for cruisers,
and how much more attractive it makes Mexico. For it means that
when coming from California, you only need to check in with the
port captain and immigration at your first port of entry. After
that, you only need to check out when you are leaving the country.
Presumably, however, you'd have to keep your tourist card current.
In a typical Mexico cruise of the past,
you'd have to check in and out of Cabo, La Paz, Puerto Escondido,
San Carlos, Mazatlan, San Blas, La Cruz, Nuevo Vallarta, Puerto
Vallarta, Barra de Navidad, and on and on. And things were never
the same, for in some places you had to pay a ship's agent exorbitant
fees - $35 one day and $40 the next day - to check in and out
of a single port. That was on top of the real fees, which were
about $20 extra for both in and out. In addition, the varying
hours of port captains, banks, immigration, and aduana
- all of whom had to be visited - meant it could often take more
than a day, and could not be done on weekends.
The net affect, assuming Tere has read
the notice correctly, is that a cruise in Mexico will cost hundreds
and hundreds of dollars less each season, but more importantly,
countless hours won't be wasted standing around filling out forms
that were just tossed in a corner anyway. Lastly, it means that
cruisers can move about whenever they want, not just when port
captain and immigration office hours allowed it.
In our opinion, the clearing process has
always been the one and only major knock on cruising Mexico,
which is a great place to cruise.
Great God Almighty, we cruisers have been
released! Viva Mexico!
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